How To Build A Quarterly Marketing Roadmap

What is a Quarterly Marketing Roadmap?

At the beginning of every new quarter, review the previous quarter, and look at the wins, challenges, and opportunities to build a roadmap that enables you to easily track and measure success. The quarterly marketing roadmap aligns your marketing team’s high-level goals with the work that needs to be done to reach them.

The marketing strategy template will help your team:

• Create a living roadmap to communicate marketing activities and align different departments on a unified marketing strategy.
• Clearly define areas of focus for short and long-term marketing initiatives.
• Manage and align stakeholder expectations and responsibilities.

This tool is intended to help your marketing, sales, and product teams align goals with the work that needs to be done to reach them.

Set up your header and outline your quarterly goals

Include a header with your company logo, name, and the date the roadmap was created to make it easy to scan the basics.

One of the primary aims of developing marketing roadmaps is to describe how marketing affects your high-level goals and to unite everyone in your organization so that you can work toward a unified goal. As a result, each stakeholder has a stronger feeling of purpose, and efficiency increases.

Define quantifiable SMART goals that align your marketing efforts with high-level company goals. If the business goal is to achieve $8M in revenue this year, the marketing roadmap should outline quarterly content and marketing goals that help bring in enough customers. For example:

• Increase website sessions by 0.35%
• Increase the monthly new marketing qualified leads (MQLs) by 15%
• Increase blog subscribers by 5%

Break down content marketing goals and tasks

Once you set SMART goals for your marketing strategy, you can break them down even further by assigning tasks and channel-specific goals. This is where you’ll get into the meat of your roadmap’s material. You can now select milestones that will have an influence on your marketing objectives. Make sure you assign ownership and due dates to each task so nothing falls through the cracks.

Start with content marketing tasks, such as:

• Research target audience
• Create content strategy
• Blog launch
• Newsletter launch

See our content marketing stack for more tasks and templates.

QUICK TIP: The task list module allows you to update the status of each item so your whole team can maintain visibility into what’s in progress, what’s next, and what’s completed. Change statuses as you go and share the link to keep both your marketing team and management always on the same page.

Define digital marketing inputs

If your marketing goal for this quarter is to increase website sessions by 0.25%, break it down even further and set specific goals for your various types of site pages like your product pages, blog, and homepage. Create roadmap items you’ll need to reach each goal.

For example:

• Keyword research
• Setup dashboard & define KPIs
• Ad trials: FB, Twitter, Instagram
• Revisit the Digital Marketing Canvas

Identify social media inputs

How will your social media efforts align with your marketing goals? What work needs to get done?

• Create social media calendar
• Build social repository
• Define the best posting frequency and time

Don’t forget to build your brand

Long-term objectives necessitate nurturing leads and developing solid client connections. When developing your roadmap, keep your brand’s identity in mind. What brand-building efforts will you take on this quarter?

• Build customer-specific landing pages
• Update style guide
• Create targeted one-pagers for the sales team

Outline Events & PR tasks this quarter

Are you planning any special events? What press releases are you planning to launch this quarter? Detail tasks, due dates, and ownership for each item.

• Update press kit with PR from Q2 product launch
• Host networking conference
• Pitch webinar ideas to management

Detail administration tasks

Don’t forget the housekeeping items. What tasks does your marketing management team need to tackle this quarter to make sure the team is on track for reaching the high-level company goals?

• Build Q3 marketing budget report
• HIRE: Digital Marketing Manager
• HIRE: Content Creator

Share your marketing roadmap as a link, evaluate and update it regularly

The quarterly marketing roadmap is interactive and meant to be updated as tasks and input items move through your marketing team’s workflows. Loop in members of your marketing team to update statuses, and add tasks and the latest updates to the living roadmap. You can share the public link to your folio to share it as a responsive webpage (and add password protection), export a PDF and post it on your bulletin board. The quarterly marketing roadmap template is adaptable just like other Xtensio tools, it can and should be repurposed, revisited, and revised regularly.

Written by

Alper Cakir

Alper Cakir is the founder and CEO of Xtensio, a next generation document collaboration platform, a staple tool for businesses globally. He boasts over 17 years in the tech industry with expertise in UX/UI design, product management, and innovative business strategy. His passion for design led him to work with major clients like CBS Interactive, NBC Universal, and Toyota. Before Xtensio, he co-founded Fake Crow in Los Angeles, known for its innovative UX/UI approach. Alper studied music theory and jazz composition at Istanbul Bilgi University and guitar at Musicians Institute in London. Known for his hands-on approach, his philosophy is to simplify processes, cut through bureaucratic red tape, and empower teams to achieve their best work.

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